musings

Layers

I was thinking yesterday morning of a children’s toy that I remember, though I can’t recall the name of it. It was a slate with a slightly waxy black surface, and you pushed a stylus into the surface to reveal a rainbow of neon colors underneath. Varying the pressure varied the line you were drawing because the waxy colors were layered like so many narrow striations in the earth.

It seemed to me an apt image for life, which is nothing (in my opinion) if not a series of layers. Experiences layered upon other experiences, moments piled on top of others, decisions guiding us onto a path we may not have consciously sought, people we meet shifting our focus yet again. Many of these things seem as insubstantial as a snowflake while in the midst of it, but somehow they pile into the immovable, rock-like banks of snow we New Englanders know so well in March.

Space, in particular, seems to hold so many layers. Specific physical places are, for me, filled to the brim with potent experiences. Sometimes when I am in a space that has housed a vital life moment, I struggle to understand how that moment has just gone and is not, somehow, existing forever in some alternate plane. There are also places that recur, places we return to again and again. These places hold us throughout our lives, function as both repository of memories and mirror to show us how we have changed.

People, of course, are full of these layers, full of varied substrata of personality and instinct and passion and thought. Getting to know someone, or becoming known ourselves, is really nothing more than an excavation of the layers. Witnessing the pentimento of the basic, essential surface of a person’s self is a rare privilege. Often this fundamental core of someone is as molten as I imagine the center of the earth to be, and vulnerable and fierce at the same time. And of course nothing is permanent, and the layers are shifting all the time; I believe even our essence can shift over time, as important people and choices influence it.

What I am wondering, though, is whether the purpose of life is to strip away all of these layers of experience and memory and influence, to uncover that fundamental seam of who we are or whether it is to go on merrily adding snowflakes to the pile, welcoming the way we are permanently altered and shifted by people we meet and experiences we share? I think I hope it is the latter, though I recognize that the task of the former is a critical part of the passage to knowing ourselves (or others).

Growing slow

Launa’s astonishingly beautiful blog has done it again. I love the subtitle, that it is about taking a year away to get back home. Her most recent post, about how she has found, in this year “off,” a place where she can breathe, where she can sleep, where can stop “white-knuckling” her way through her life really moves me. I’ve excerpted my favorite passage, the last three paragraphs, but the whole thing (and the whole blog!) is well worth reading.

It is intensely familiar, this sense of holding on so tightly but not being sure either what it is that I’m holding, or why. This feeling of crossing off days with “relief, exasperation, exhaustion and regret.” That’s not every day for me, but it is too many of them. And, like Launa, I don’t like it. I guess it’s progress that I have finally begun to see through the fog to what it is that I think I want my reality to look like next, the challenge is getting from here to there. I need to trust this incipient sense of what the next step is, and to find my way there.

I love the image of “sitting inside of change” and know for sure that I have no idea what that would feel like. I’ve never sat still long enough. My summer of rest from running was a tiny, teeny version of that, microscopic. And even that was hard for me! I hope that someday (soon?) I will be able to summon Launa’s courage, and strike out myself to find a way to discover such stillness, such rest, such peace.

Abigail will be eight on Saturday. I want to write down every day and every change, as a way of holding on to time as it moves past. Late last winter into the spring, I crossed every day off the calendar with a combination of relief, exasperation, exhaustion and regret. I knew then that was wrong, and that it was no way to live; worse, I knew that I had talked myself into that life, and into that state. I had nobody but myself to blame, and had forgotten that nobody but me will remind me to live.

I fought this move, hard. I couldn’t believe, back then, that moving away, specifically moving so far away, would sort out whatever it was that was making me cross off the days and white-knuckle through the nights. I just couldn’t see what was ahead, so focused was I on where I was. Poor Bill, who had not only to make all the plans and scrape together the visa, but also to withstand my foul moods and grouchy premonitions of disaster.

For the record: he is often right, and I am wrong. But he has never, ever, been so right as this time. Now I can let myself feel the days, the hours, and the minutes passing without so much argument. I have the wholly unaccustomed pleasure of just sitting inside of change. I have the surprising gift of sleep and quiet and calm. Rather than crossing off my days, I can grow slow through these last few months of this fourth decade of my little life, and into a century and a Millennium that will roll along ahead of all of us, no matter whether we sleep, or where, or how soundly.

Creativity and procreativity

This picture, of Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz, was the first page of my thesis. I love the way the image speaks of creativity and procreativity, of the tension and symbiosis between them.

The news of Kim Clijster’s US Open win – remarkable because she was the first unseeded winner but also, more notably, because she is the first mother to win in almost 30 years – reminded me of my thesis. Of all of the endless debate – perennial or boring? – about motherhood and creativity, motherhood and career, broadly defined. Take the leap with me, please, from tennis court to writer’s desk … it’s not really that far-fetched.

As I did in 1996, I reject utterly the notion that women must choose one or the other branch of the tree – I believe that while motherhood requires certain compromises on the part of the mother/artist, it also enriches the content of the art incalculably. That statement is hardly inflammatory now, but it’s important not to forget that until the mid 20th century it was quite unusual for a woman to be both a mother and an artist.

The history of female artists is filled with women who sacrificed their potential as mothers to succeed as writers: Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore are just a few examples. I am more familiar with writers, but this is also true of visual artists, Georgia O’Keeffe being a primary example.

It was my thesis poets (Rich, Kumin, and Sexton) who represented the first generation of women unwilling to accept this binary view of the world. In the poetry these women wrote, and in the art of other of their contemporaries, we see the ongoing negotiation of the border and relationship between creativity and procreativity. For every woman, every mother, every artist this negotiation is unique, of course, but out of its struggle true art is made.

I believe that parenthood, broadly defined, is a source of rich inspiration for artists of either gender. For women who give birth to their children, perhaps, this is even more visceral, given the raw exposure pregnancy and childbirth provides to physical regeneration and reproduction. The tensions between the two roles, while irrefutable, may also provide a vein of deep emotion, conflict, and thought for many artists to tap. The impact of Sexton, Kumin, and, especially, Rich was profound: these women removed the taboo on the territory of motherhood (and, in truth, daughterhood), exposing its complexities and darknesses as poetic material that is not only valid but deeply moving. These poets gave a generation of writers permission to explore the sources of emotional conflict and the complex forest of identity. I for one am grateful.

terroir

(random photo, but going with the wine theme, August 2007)

“In wine it is called terroir: the peculiarities of the soil, the water, the very angle of the sun, the land that makes a wine distinctly itself.” (Meg Giles)

Terroir: originally a French term in wine, coffee and tea used to denote the special characteristics that geography bestowed upon particular varieties. At its core is the assumption that the land from which the grapes are grown imparts a unique quality… (wikipedia)

Terroir.

The soil in which we grow, which contributes mightily to who we become. Been thinking about that today. It seems to me that the terroir of our childhood is the most critical, though I believe that people we meet and experiences we have in adulthood continue to have major impact on who we are and who we grow into as well. Of course as we grow older we have more control over who we let become our terroir, more ability to shape the components of the soil out of which we grow.

My childhood was a rich terroir, full of transatlantic airplane trips, whole summer days spent playing outside with our neighbors on Fairfield Street, the four families, piles of books so omnipresent that you tripped over them, Daddy DC, a very early Macintosh computer, walking alone from school down Brattle Street to the CCAE, the ship room in Mattapoisett, the shag carpet and mirrored bureau in New Hampshire.

There were knee socks, two braids, baguettes, and my father running behind me on a pebbled driveway in the French countryside watching me bike away, for the first time on two wheels. Nana’s cosmos in a heavy-bottomed vase on Fleetwing, Gaga’s Miss Piggy books, Ba’s boiling water before cutting the asparagus, and Pops’ basement workshop full of intoxicating smells of fresh cut wood and the allure of projects. Hilary was on the ground when the stroller broke in the Arc de Triomphe traffic, I was in the emergency room on Cape Cod with a broken arm in a leotard, Dad was smiling at 40 with his new windsurfer, Mum was masterfully cooking delicious things in the kitchen with no recipe and letting us and our friends paint on the walls of the back hallway (still, the coolest mother in the world).

The weather, both internal and external, also contributes to our terroir. The humidity of Mattapoisett summers, the snapping cold of the Waterville chairlift, London’s gray rain, the dry air and dusty velvet curtains in our first Paris apartment. The internal weather is harder to map, shifting as it does daily, but it has for sure been stormy.

Just thinking about this today, about the people, places, and experiences that shape who we are. I believe there are a handful of people who have had significant impact on me, who have contributed enormously to the particular flavor of the wine I am becoming. You know who you are.